Determining the presence, permanence, and location of passengers and drivers, inside and outside a vehicle may be useful for many purposes. Current occupant detection and location systems utilize cameras, seat sensors, and key-fob or mobile device detection. While suitable for many applications, each of these systems has some drawbacks.
Camera systems can be expensive due to requisite computational power and optics requirements that allow a vision system camera to distinguish one face from another. Additionally, the user being recognized must be in view of the camera, and cannot have any obstruction (scarf, coat collar, hat etc) blocking a recognizable portion of his face. Further, ambient conditions such as glare from excessive sunlight, shadows, or a dark environment can cause difficulty in recognizing faces.
Seat sensors have been presented as another occupant detection option. These sensors can detect weight in a seat, but cannot necessarily distinguish between objects and an occupant. Further, since multiple people may have similar weights, the sensor may have difficulty assigning an identity to a detected occupant.
Key fob detection may be used to identify a driver and any other occupant carrying a fob. A problem with this solution is that another party (spouse, child) could be carrying the fob, and the system may have no way of discerning which party is carrying the fob. Similarly, mobile phone detection may work reasonably well since one person typically carries her own phone, and only her own phone. However, shared phones and phones left lying in vehicles can cause present challenges. For example a party may be misidentified when possessing another party's phone, or a phone left in the vehicle may be identified as a non-present party.
If a vehicle can accurately identify and locate the individual occupants, the vehicle can leverage a variety of useful related services based on the identified occupants and associated locations.